The term Management Dashboard defines a wide range of data reporting and visualization tools or dashboards that allow using various performance & efficiency measures to report on an enterprise’s ability to organize and coordinate its activities in accordance with certain policies and in achievement of pre-determined objectives.

QA Department functions and workflow

The best way for a business to manage quality is to introduce an effective quality assurance management system into the enterprise processes and operations which should be under careful quality control of QA Department. Such a system is concerned with planning quality control measures, checking and reviewing operations and procedures that has been done at the enterprise. QA Department operates such major function as follows:

Development of QA policy. This function assumes development, maintenance and improvement of tasks and procedures of QA management, QA policy and also quality control over various projects, production, selling and other activity. Certified procedures and guides are the basic documentation of QA management system. After all required documentation for development of QA policy has been combined which is confirmed, for example, with Standard MS ISO 9001, the quality control will be performed with reference to and in accordance with the collected documentation.

Evaluation of quality level. These evaluations are carried out by means of original or adopted techniques used in the company and its divisions. The evaluations can be of two types - practical and numerical.The first type is used on production meetings of experts by means of discussion of certain issues in business procedures and operations. Numerical evaluation is settled up mainly on the basis of model Total Quality Management (TQM). Depending on selected evaluation type, managers will review and document current quality issues in procedures and operations.

For example, users of CentriQS BM software can access the Issues view to track quickly issues by Title, Impact, Projects, etc. They can add note to the issues:

Internal and external audit. This function assumes internal and external audit of the quality management system and quality assurance in divisions and enterprise services. It is possible to tell that this is the most important function. It is a feedback of quality control system. It is a point that distinguishes a modern quality management based on Standard MS ISO 9000 and TQM from all previous models.
For example, CentriQS allows organizing quality issues by Folder and Impact – this will help users focus on required items in the Issue view:

Documentation. The function is aimed to create and keep documents on the projects for formalizing task and processes, keeping statistics and getting lessons learnt. The enterprise can quickly get valued information and use it to make correction to ongoing activity and improve quality management.
In CentriQS, all files and documents can be stored within the database. Users can access required files in the Files view. They can also put link to files stored on local/shared driers or on the Web.

In accordance with the mentioned functions QA Department builds its workflow and manages tasks of the employees. The instance of the usual workflow can be built on the following processes:

Identifying what checks and arrangements are required

Preliminary checking components/ingredients/materials

Checking components

Checking packaging materials

Checking packed products

Customer support

Each of the processes is divided into tasks which are assigned to employees of QA Department. For example, the process "Checking components" can be divided into such task list as "Component 1", "Component 2", "Component 3", and so on. QA Manager assigns QA Specialists to these tasks, set task due dates and priorities.